Blue Mercy: A Novel. (14 page)

I topped up my coffee from her pot, unable to meet her eye, uncertain what was being said. "I wouldn't let Dr Keane hear you saying that, Pauline," I said, in a jokey voice. "He might think you did it."

He wouldn't, of course. None of them would, not of her. But they thought it of me.

One evening when I arrived home from work, a package was waiting for me in the hall. I immediately recognized the handwriting. My heart clenched, as if an ice hand had thrust itself inside and squeezed.

Star looked up at me, bangs falling into her eyes."What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Aren't you going to open it?"

"Maybe later."

"Who's it from?"

"Have you done your homework?"

As soon as I could, I took it into my bedroom. Inside, I found a book.
Words Alone Are Certain Good: WB Yeats, Religion and the Occult.
By Zach Coleman.

 
The room started to spin. I sat on the bed and when it came to a stop, I opened the book and found this inscription on the fly-leaf, in his handwriting:
For my first love, Mercy Mulcahy.
And below, a quote from Yeats, writing about Maud:
 
"
I will not in grey hours revoke/ The gift I gave in hours of light."
 

Zach forgave me?
 

Could it be? With him at my side,
 
I would be able to cope with Star. With anything. With him, all would be well. I opened his letter with a shuddering heart.
 

Dear Mercy,

I hope you are well. I can write that sentence now -- and so I can write to you (don't worry, just this once).

I wanted to send you a copy of my book (enclosed). I teach English Lit. now at UCLA and this book is based on my MPhil. In it, I try to show how Yeats combined the myths of ancient, heroic Ireland with a belief in Western magic to create a new mythology and a new religion. That all his writing, including the poetry, was devoted to disseminating his belief system.

Will you read it? I'd like to think you might try. Will you enjoy it? I doubt it. I'm not sure any lay person can even finish it -- but I wanted you to have a copy because it was you who introduced me to WB.

Also, I wanted to say to you that I've come to think of him as being so like you, in the way that oppositions tormented him and at the same time drove him on.
 

Perhaps none of this is of any interest to you. Then how about this? That famous line he used to describe Maud Gonne: "I had never thought to see in a living woman such great beauty." That's just how I felt all the time when I was with you, Mercy. Are you still beautiful? Still breaking hearts?

For a long time, I have to tell you, I did not wish you well. I wanted something to come along and hurt you like you hurt me. You killed our love, so how could I not hate you, even if, in the doing, you hurt yourself too? But now I am grateful to you -- and I wanted you to know that.

And to know how my work benefitted from knowing you. Whatever I might have studied, it would not have been Yeats's magic and poetry had I not known you -- and now the influence of Eastern philosophy on his beliefs and poems is opening up another world to me. He, and all the writers you introduced me to, have led to a thousand good things for me, Mercy, so for that, too, I am grateful.

I hope it worked out for you with your ex but I suspect it didn't. Maybe that's what you really wanted -- to be alone? I don't know. This isn't coming out right, I really didn't want to go over all that -- otherwise I'd have written long ago. What I wanted was to tell you that I am, at last, over us. And now that I am, what I'm left with is gratitude.

I'm not providing an address, Mercy, and I won't write again. There's no going back for us, I do know that. I just wanted you to know that I'm at last able to hope that it worked out for you and your husband and your little girl, who I suppose is not so little any more.

Be happy.

Zach

Not so little any more, no. And not in need of help any more either, so please, just leave her alone.

I remember the morning I told Dr Aintree that Star was cured. She and Ginnie, her schoolfriend who lived next door, were in the kitchen, making flapjacks for the school fair.
 
They were on the rim of adolescence, sometimes high or low or beside themselves with feeling, but a lot of the time still childlike, cocooned in a thought-free moment they were in.
 

I had come into the dining room in stockinged feet, looking for my shoes, and I stopped for the joy of listening, liking the camaraderie of their voices around the joint effort, the ten-minute fuss over measuring the oats, the homely clunk of the baking utensils. Ginnie was complaining about her mother and making Star laugh with stories about her absent-mindedness.
 

Then Star spoke about me. "At least she leaves you alone. When my mom gets cold," she said, and I could hear the roll of her eyes, "she puts a sweater on me."

I was so shocked I gasped.

"Mom? Is that you?"
 

"Hi girls," I called up a breezy voice that implied, I hope not too emphatically, that I had heard nothing, nothing at all. "Just getting my shoes. I'm heading out for a walk."
 

In a way, it was nothing. Only the sound of separation, of a child stepping away from a parent. Nothing was more everyday.

I took my shock up the hill, towards Turner's Point, the highest outcrop on the coast near us, two miles from our house. Some yards west of the public viewing point, I found a small pathway, concealed and overgrown. I took it and follow its winding way through grasses and dry spiky shrubs to a flat shelf of rock jutting out over the ocean, a natural viewing bench. The sky made a high domed ceiling of blue and, ninety feet below me, the swoosh of the waves closed over a small beach. Over. And over.

I sat and cried my freshest outburst of tears. Each bout had its own root and rhythm and today, it was out-loud sobbing in the outdoors, not silent weeping into my pillow, or salt swallowed and gagged while turned in towards a supermarket shelf. These tears held pride in Star, self-pity for me, and relief and loneliness all erupting into each other.
 

The detachment in Star's voice was exactly what Dr Aintree and I had been working for. What I hadn't expected was that hearing it would be hard. I was going to be all alone. Why, why,
why
had I let Zach go? What, what,
what
might have been?

After a time, I left my rocky perch, promising myself I'd come back again, and often, and retraced my steps back along the little pathway. As I walked, I cultivated my regrets. I turned into a conveyance of thought, dead to the day around me, full of brooding thoughts of where I had gone wrong.
 
Until I caught myself, stopped in the middle of the pathway, remonstrating with Zach in my head. Telling him what he should have done to rescue us from me. Arguing against the arguments I was putting in his mouth.

Pathetic. A crazy old biddy talking to herself: that was what I'd become. That was what lay ahead. Star was going to outgrow me, which was as it should be. Which was a good thing. And Mr Broken-Hearted had already outgrown me.
 

I can't, I can't, I can't live without you
, he'd wailed, in the car, forehead grinding into his hands. Yet, here he was, not just living but thriving.
He
wasn't in floods of tears on a rock. He was happy. He had enough happy left over to be grateful.
 

Grateful: God, I could hate him for that.

You will agree that my passage through life thus far has been chequered: an absent mother, a menacing father, a feckless husband, a dearly departed lover, a troubled child. It's not self-pity, I hope, to say any one of these events could be considered unfortunate, but I've come to know that everybody suffers, that if I didn't have all that big stuff to worry about, I would have fretted more over the small.
 

Zach's letter did me a favor, making me finally sign up for a B.A. course at UCSP, availing of a funding program especially designed for single mothers that gave me a fees waiver and a small stipend. I had been drawn in by the English and American Literature course but had begun a Women's Studies component that was turning out to be far more significant for me. My literature lectures reminded me too much of my old biology class, with our teacher swinging her finger around with an eye on top, having just dissected a rabbit. Cutting up stories and poems made me feel faint, like something was being violated.

No, it was Women's Studies that was teaching me what I needed to know, awakening me to politics and economics as well as literature, bringing me to all of life and making sense of my own. For while my classmates, mostly - except for Marsha - fifteen years younger than me, enjoyed the camaraderie of UCSP's small campus, I had to juggle classes and assignments with work as Dining Manager at Honolulu.

I'd overcome my scorn of managers now I was one myself and found that their life wasn't as easy as it looked when you were on the other side. And the increased wage, now called a salary and paid monthly instead of weekly, still wasn't enough to support me and Star. Without my scholarship, and the help of some friends, I couldn't have managed. When I read back my
 
diaries of that time, I wonder how I did. I used to
 
oscillate between gratitude and grief, knowing I was lucky to be able to do what I was doing, but forever running after myself in a perpetual time and money squeeze.
 

I have a list in front of me that I drew up for my course, part of the personal development work that our Director of Studies deemed essential, the personal being political.
 
I was to enumerate all the things I had in my life that I liked and made me proud. I started this exercise thinking it wasn't much to show for ten years in Santa Paola -- a modest three-bedroomed bungalow (two
 
bath); a six-year-old car outside the door -- but instead of my usual standpoint of bemoaning what I didn't have, and trying to work out how I was going to get us what we needed, never mind what I would have wanted, my task was to stop and give myself credit for what I had achieved.

So I listed them, all the things I was grateful for. The new Philips record player. My Remington typewriter. The rug on my easy chair in the hall, my favorite thing to wrap round me. The towers
 
of books and records towers in rooms all over the house. My yard full of flowers. My vacations in Mexico, in a beachside hut lent by a friend. My friends. My daughter. It made me feel better. The people that most people took for granted -- father, mother, husband, love of my life -- might all have left me, but Star and I were doing okay.

It was an important moment for me and it's an important memory. Golden. I look back on that short period in my life the way my father's generation used to look back on the years up to 1914. Suffused in sepia tones that shade out so much. Far from being a tranquil, rosy time, Edwardian Britain and Ireland boiled; the army mutinied; suffragettes starved and threw themselves under racehorses; labor unions learned the power of the strike and the House of Lords forced a constitutional crisis. You'd never know any of that to listen to the harker-backers.

I refused to hark back. And I feared to look too far forward. Just the smallest while later, I would be remembering with wonder that me who sat so tentatively dispensing her pride upon the things she loved. She would seem so poignant, all unknowing of what lay just ahead, waiting in ambush.

Star's Adolescence. Oh yes, capital A.

It arrived sudden and complete, like a light switch turned off. One day, Star and I were on the same side, tackling her childhood problems together; the next, I was fumbling about, unable to help. Worse, I had somehow, suddenly, became the enemy.

Photographs of Star as a young girl always show her with a golden tan, dressed in whites and blues and pinks but once we get to her teens, the photographs stopped. She forbade them. If allowed, they would have looked like pictures from the black-and-white days. She stopped growing at fourteen and, during that year, a tall, skinny, golden-fair child turned short, as her school-mates passed her out, and fat and dark. She dyed her hair the color of soot, and cut and gelled it so it stood up straight from the crown, except for bangs that were so low I wouldn't have been able to see her eyes, if it weren't for the kohl rim around them.

She started wearing what was to effectively become her uniform: black lycra t-shirts with a wide elasticated belt pulled tight so her flesh bulged above and below, bulges that grew and shrank, multiplied and melted, depending on what stage she was on with her latest diet. A skirt not much wider than the belt.
 
Chunky boots and pantyhose in -- what else? -- black. Clothes that simultaneously called for, and shunned, attention. A body that wanted to claim space and also to disappear.

And beneath, a devouring drive that I called "It". She wanted to eat but she didn't want to eat but she wanted to eat but she didn't want to eat but she wanted to eat but she didn't want to eat but... The fatter she got, the more comfort she needed, and so the more she was driven to eat and the more she needed to stop herself. It would not give her rest, I felt, until she was entirely consumed.
 

At first, I stifled my knowing. I told myself it was classic teenager stuff -- bad crowd, drinking, smoking, overeating -- and I was being the classic worry-mom. Hadn't I done all this myself in my own way, learned and grown from it? Wasn't this sort of self-fracturing essential for a child to crack open and mutate into a functioning adult? Hadn't we already come through tough stuff? If I stayed vigilant in the wings, doling her enough love and care and attention of the right kind, she'd be okay. Sooner or later, she'd be back in a shape that fitted.